The head of the Croatian Institute for Emergency Medicine (HZHM), Maja Grba-Bujevic, appeared on N1 television's morning show Novi Dan on Thursday to talk about the death of a young man on Sunday in the town of Zapresic which resulted in a public outcry, with protests and calls for Health Minister to step down.

The 22-year-old man had collapsed in the streets of the town of Zapresic, west of Zagreb, on Sunday. Although the first emergency response unit arrived at the scene within minutes, the team did not include a qualified doctor. Another team including a doctor arrived 27 minutes later from the nearby town of Jastrebarsko, but failed to help the man, and meanwhile another person died in Jastrebarsko while the local team was on assignment in Zapresic.

The case provoked strong reactions and public outcry, with protests in Zapresic and Zagreb in front of health ministry buildings, with many interpreting the tragic series events as a failure of the national emergency medical system.

The Health Ministry said it is investigating the case, and the findings are expected to be made public soon.

When reporters asked you on Wednesday if you considered yourself responsible for the tragic case in Zapresic, you replied by saying that your role was not important – however, you have been head of the HZHM since 2009, serving under five different health ministers, and you helped create the emergency medical reform in 2011. Do you think you should resign?

“I co-created everything regarding the professional standards. My institute has 13 employees, it draws up guidelines, pertaining to what employees must know, the equipment they must have available in their vehicles, and the skills they must have. Every day we try to improve these things. But the actual implementation is done by county-level emergency medicine institutes. I have no supervisory or inspection role, and I have no say in how they work because they are independent bodies. This concept did not come into being when I arrived at the HZHM, it had already been in place by then.”

Would you be willing to resign if somebody asks you to do so?

“I am ready to leave on my own, if my resignation is seen as something helpful. I am not important here. I’m an anaesthesiology specialist, and I could find work wherever I want in Europe. I spent my life on improving emergency medical care. I have been saying for years that the system must be improved. I’d love it if we had more teams and doctors, but we simply don’t, and I don’t have a magic hat to pull them out of… What we have now is a public hysteria directed against emergency physicians, and these people are doing their jobs impeccably well.”

There are only 45 emergency medical teams covering 350,000 people living in the Zagreb County, the county that surrounds the capital city of Zagreb but does not include it. Is that enough?

“The County said in 2016 that they had too few teams, and then they were granted extra teams. And since then, they did not ask for more. They are the ones suggesting what to do, and it’s us accepting or rejecting their suggestions. I can’t just come to a county and say they’ll be given another 40 emergency medical teams to service the area. In my opinion the emergency service of Zagreb County should be merged with that of the City of Zagreb. But nobody ever asked about my opinion.”

The current Health Minister, Milan Kujundzic, has been in office since 2016. Have you talked with him about deficiencies in the system?

“We talked about a lot of things and I stressed the problems we have. I told him there were places around the country where we are understaffed. I said that the local government is not paying their compulsory funding for emergency medicine… Local authorities could invest even more in improving their emergency service, but they don’t want to. At present, they don’t even spend any funding on what they are required (by law), so emergency medical services are broke.”

Have you ever thought about going public with these issues and say that the ministry has no understanding for your proposals?

“I constantly point to the fact that non-emergency patients cannot be in our care, we simply cannot accept these people. I had convinced former minister Dario Nakic (who was in office from January to October 2016) to increase the number of teams. At present we have about 3,000 people in the system. And less than three percent of health spending is used to fund the entire emergency medical service in the country, we are stretched thin. The funding is decentralised, it is earmarked by counties, it is their call what they need the money for, and I have no influence over that.”

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